Part 6 (1/2)

Or if you'd like to share why an apple a day keeps the doctor away, you might wish to show how nutritious an apple is.

You might wish to share your idea of apple perfection, the apple pie.

Or you might find it more useful to explain how to make that perfect apple pie.

You might wish to show the apple all by itself, the better to point out specific details of the fruit.

Or maybe it makes more sense to compare the apple to other fruits that the islander may already know.

You could show how an apple begins.

Or you could show how the apple ends.

Wow! All that from one apple? Believe it or not, standing there on the beach with nothing but a pen, a napkin, and an islander looking at you, you've activated every corner of your mind's eye and both sides of your brain. From an imagining perspective, you've taken a single simple starting idea-apple-and let your mind's eye run wild with it, conjuring up views, aspects, and details you might never have thought of if you'd been able to get away with, ”Yep. Tastes like an apple.”

At the same time you were tossing this apple around in your head, you were also beginning to think about how-in this particular circ.u.mstance and to this particular audience-to visually describe your apple so that it would make the most sense to the islander. In other words, you were starting to think about your own idea from your audience's perspective, recognizing that in other circ.u.mstances there might be better or different ways to draw it.

OK, let's step off the beach and back to reality for a moment. Since I know this is going to come up (it always does), I'm going to address something that you might be thinking. If we'd just gone through this exercise in a workshop, guaranteed somebody would say, ”Now, wait a minute. You told us we're dealing with a local islander, and yet here we're sketching out nutritional breakdowns and apple pie cooking instructions. That's silly. The islander isn't going to care about that.”

To which I say, ”Possibly, but I never told you what the islander looked like. If he or she was wearing a gra.s.s skirt, perhaps the first picture might be the best. But what if this islander was wearing a lab coat and had a stethoscope around his or her neck? Or what if he or she was wearing a baker's hat? Which apple pictures would be better then?”

And that's really the second point of the exercise-to recognize that even if we have only one seemingly simple idea to share, there are always many ways to show it to our audience, and some are far more appropriate and effective than others. That's why tossing this apple back and forth is both a great way to force our mind's eye into looking at our idea in multiple ways (always discovering something new as we do) and to start thinking about what's going to be the best way-from our audience's point of view-to eventually show it.

Enter the SQVID: The Full-Brain Visual Workout What we just went through on the beach was the SQVID exercise. At its most basic level, the SQVID is just a series of five questions that we walk our initial idea through in order to bring it to visual clarity and to refine its focus-both according to what's most important to us and what's most important to our audience. The SQVID helps us imagine what visual messages we'd like to convey before we start worrying about which picture we're going to draw.

The word SQVID is a simple mnemonic composed of the first letter of the first word of the same five questions that we tossed around back there on the beach. (Note: the V is taken from the Roman U, and the D is from the Greek for delta, the symbol of change. So we could say this is both a multilingual and a cla.s.sical SQVID. ) THE FIVE S-Q-V-I-D QUESTIONS ARE: DO I WANT TO SHOW...

S stands for: Simple vs. Elaborate Q stands for: Quality vs. Quant.i.ty V stands for: Vision vs. Execution I stands for: Individual attributes vs. Comparison D stands for: Delta (or Change) vs. Status quo Drawn out side by side, the SQVID looks like this: DISSECTING THE SQVID.

There are two main ways to use the SQVID, both simple and insightful. The first-as we did on the beach-is to walk through the five questions in order and think of how we could visually describe our idea according to each option: a simple view or an elaborate view, a qualitative view or a quant.i.tative view, etc. Then, either on paper or just in our mind's eye, draw out what each view might look like.

SQVID pathway 1: By walking our idea through the five questions and coming up with a visual description for each end, we force our mind's eye to come up with at least ten different views.

As we've seen, this pathway through the SQVID forces our visual system to switch gears back and forth as we move from question to question, extreme to extreme. (Try it: I swear you can literally feel your mind's eye grinding metal as it jumps from quant.i.tative visual description to visionary visual description and so on. It's a trip.) This s.h.i.+fting of gears in turn exercises corners of our mind's eye we rarely explore, forcing us to conjure up images that we rarely think of. This pathway is ideal for generating an unexpectedly broad number of ways to visually represent our idea, and leaves us with many views to choose from when it comes time to pick which to show.

The second pathway through the SQVID is driven less by our idea and more by our antic.i.p.ated audience's expectations. In this approach, we use the SQVID like a graphic equalizer, identifying which overall ”settings” are most useful to our audience, regardless of the details of what we're going to describe. For example, we may know that whenever we need to share any idea with our company's project managers, we should skew toward quant.i.tative, execution-oriented visuals, but if we'll be talking with the press, we may want to skew toward simple visionary representations.

SQVID pathway 2: By setting the graphic equalizer sliders toward the views we think will be most relevant to our audience, we provide focus on which type of picture will be best to show them.

THE SQVID IS BRAIN FOOD FOR THE WHOLE BRAIN.

Either way we walk through the SQVID (idea focusing or audience focusing), a pattern emerges between the upper and lower extremes of the SQVID that will prove useful for really pus.h.i.+ng our thinking-and for addressing an eternal conflict in business problem solving. On the upper part of each slider we see simplicity, quality, vision, individuality, and change. These skew toward what are typically considered creative attributes: the descriptive, the synthetic, the different, the abstract, attributes that are difficult to measure and carry more emotional weight. We'll call the top the ”warm” side of the equalizer.

When we look at the lower extreme of each slider-complexity, quant.i.ty, execution, comparison, and the status quo-we see alignment toward the more traditional notions of business attributes-attributes that are numeric, a.n.a.lytic, detailed, factual, and measurable. Because these are more rational and detached from emotional a.s.sociations, we'll call the bottom side of the equalizer the ”cool” side.

In other words, by forcing ourselves to look at our idea from every point on the SQVID, a fascinating thing happens, with an equally fascinating outcome: We fully activate both the left (”a.n.a.lytic”) and right (”creative”) sides of our brain.* This means that if we're the kind of person who thrives on detailed quant.i.tative a.n.a.lysis of problems, using the SQVID activates both our more familiar thinking style and the creative side that we don't see so much. Conversely, if we consider ourselves as more visionary or qualitative, using the SQVID gets us to work out the kinks on our more a.n.a.lytic side.

Attributes on the top of the SQVID are ”warm” or ”right brain”: simple, qualitative, visionary, etc. Those on the bottom are ”cool” or ”left brain”: complex, quant.i.tative, execution oriented, etc.

This means that the SQVID serves as an excellent way to get groups of businesspeople who might rarely understand one another's points of view to begin to see eye to eye.

FOR RIGHT BRAINERS.

When the creatively inclined need to deal with those hard-nosed business types: One benefi t of the SQVID is that by creating a structured and repeatable way of using our abilities to imagine, the approach ill.u.s.trates in a concrete way the importance of looking at both warm/creative and cool/business attributes when thinking through an idea.

So, when facing a dubious business type as you describe the value of your simple, qualitative, visionary, individualistic, and industry-changing idea, show them how it fi ts into the rationality of the SQVID.

FOR LEFT BRAINERS.

When the business inclined need to deal with those squishy, abstract, creative people: One benefi t of the SQVID is that by visually defi ning the interplay of both the emotional and the rational when imagining an idea, it intuitively and conceptually ill.u.s.trates the need to balance creative visioning with practical business considerations.

So when facing a dubious creative type when you need to share the value of your complex, quant.i.tative, execution-oriented comparison of present-day realities, show them how it fi ts into the creativity of the SQVID.

The SQVID in Action As pleasant as it is to imagine ourselves on that beach drawing pictures of apples, a far more likely scenario will find us running into a coworker at the watercooler, meeting with an employee in cubicle land, or preparing to give a presentation to the board of directors in the conference room. And while we're probably not going to need to describe an apple, we will need to describe just exactly what it is that we are working on.

To see how we can use the SQVID's five questions to help focus our visual ideas, let's take a look at how others have approached answering them. The rest of this chapter takes each of the five questions and shows how they were visually addressed by real people, in all cases business professionals with no formal training in the visual arts.

QUESTION 1: SIMPLE OR ELABORATE?.

When I introduce the SQVID as a visual thinking tool and talk about the first question, someone always asks, ”Isn't 'complex' the opposite of 'simple'? And for that matter, if the idea of pictures is to clarify communications, why would anyone ever want to intentionally show complexity?”

This is an excellent question itself because it demands two important but subtle answers. First, the opposite of ”simple” is not ”complex,” but rather ”elaborate.” The Mobius strip, a continuous ribbon that is folded over so that mathematically speaking it has only one side, is a perfect example of something that is both complex and simple at the same time.

Second, this is not just a minor point of semantics: It cuts right to the heart of solving problems with pictures. One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification. The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible-not by making it simple. Whether that goal demands a simple picture, an elaborate one, or an intentionally complex one is almost always determined by the audience and its familiarity with the subject being addressed.